Traveling Ruby allows you to create self-contained, “portable” Ruby binaries which can run on any Linux distribution and any OS X machine. This allows Ruby app developers to distribute a single package to end users, without needing end users to first install Ruby or gems.

We’ve released version 20150130, which has some important changes. We advise everyone to upgrade!

OpenSSL upgraded to 1.0.1l.

The builtin OpenSSL library has been upgraded to version 1.0.1l, which fixes some security vulnerabilities. This is why we strongly recommend everyone to upgrade.

Many new native extensions packaged

Many new native extensions have been packaged because they are being used by Elasticrawl and Octodown.

RedCloth

escape_utils

posix-spawn

nokogumbo

github-markdown

rugged

charlock_holmes

unf_ext

CA certificate fixes

The Linux version and the OS X version now use the same CA root certificates. This fixes GH-24.

Future plans

It is planned that this is the last version on Ruby 2.1. The next version is planned to use Ruby 2.2, as discussed on GH-28.

We have recently been interviewed by the awesome guys at The Changelog, a weekly blog and podcast about open source projects. In this interview I explained a bit about Phusion’s history, what’s new in Phusion Passenger 5, how the Raptor campaign came to be, why we chose to run the campaign like that, the challenges of open source, future Passenger developments, etc.

Indeed, running an open source company has been a big challenge:

A lot of people say, “Hey, if you’re open source, and you want to make money, try selling support.” We tried doing that, but it didn’t work at all, because Passenger is too good.

Phusion will be traveling across the US this October to give tech talks on their future vision of app deployment. We’ve been working on some pretty exciting stuff and our friends over at AirBnB and ConstantContact have generously offered to host us over at their San Francisco and Waltham offices respectively to talk about this:

Writing an app is one thing, deploying it to a production ready environment and keeping it online in the face of countless potential scenarios of adversity is an entirely different beast. Not only does it currently still involve a fair bit of expertise when it comes to unix-fu, it also involves keeping an eye out on the latest software and configure them properly to combat things like security breaches. This is all generally considered tedious and cumbersome work, and often outside the domain of knowledge of developers. Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t need to go through as many hoops as we need to do today and make it more developer friendly?

This talk will go over the most important steps currently involved in setting up a production environment for your a web app and will propose alternative approaches as well in the form of new software solutions developed by Phusion. This talk will focus on app deployment, monitoring and server provisioning, but will also touch upon topics such as UI design and UX as the latter plays an important part in making things more accessible. More specifically, we’ll discuss Docker, Polymer, Node, Rails, Phusion Passenger, Union Station and much more.

RSVP to attend!

Get notified about our tech talk recording

Unable to attend? No worries! We’ll be giving this series of tech talks over at our friends at Twitter too, who have generously offered to record it. We expect to be able to post it up online sometime in the future. Be sure to follow us on @phusion_nl and/or sign up to our newsletter to stay in the loop on this.

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On behalf of the Phusion team, we’re looking forward to meeting up with you next month!

BubbleConf: One day of ideas and action with the brightest minds from tech, design, UX and business.

In little over a month from now, we’ll be opening the doors to BubbleConf 2012, our very first conference for tech startups on design, development and entrepreneurship. BubbleConf will be held in the beautiful Tuschinski theater in Amsterdam and we’re extremely excited to be part of this event together with Nedap and Teixido. In this blog post, we will unveil one of the final speakers at BubbleConf.

But first, a word from our sponsor

We are proud to have managed hosting provider True on board. Last decade they have been involved in the rise of big Dutch start-ups; True assisted websites like AFAS Personal, Symbaloo, Hyves, Flabber and Tweakers in their road from startup to one of the biggest sites in the Netherlands. Thats why True wants to celebrate entrepreneurship with us and learn from each other to grow as online entrepreneurs.

Speakers++;

We are extremely excited to announce Philip Su of Facebook as one of our final speakers at BubbleConf!

Philip is a software engineer and the site lead at Facebook London. Philip created Facebook’s Video Calling feature and worked on the recent release of Facebook Messages. Before Facebook, Philip worked at Microsoft as an engineer and engineering manager in Windows, Office, MSN, and Bing. He has two young children and enjoys seeing them learn to spell words like “colour” and use phrases like “the loo.”

Philip’s talk will be on Facebook’s Hack Culture. The Hack Culture at Facebook optimizes foremost for engineering efficiency and embraces the assumption that you do not ultimately know what your customers want (and instead need to enable rapid experiments to be deployed as quickly as possible). This talk outlines how the Hack Culture is embraced at Facebook and what practical effects it has on how Facebook develops and releases software, including its impact on how Facebook’s engineers and designers interact to produce the best designs quickly.

After chatting with Philip for a while, it quickly became apparent to us that we just had to have him over as a speaker at BubbleConf: we’re confident he’ll be able to deliver an enticing talk for developers and designers alike.

Recap of our speakers

Philip Su

Philip is a software engineer and the site lead at Facebook London. Philip created Facebook’s Video Calling feature and worked on the recent release of Facebook Messages. Before Facebook, Philip worked at Microsoft as an engineer and engineering manager in Windows, Office, MSN, and Bing. He has two young children and enjoys seeing them learn to spell words like “colour” and use phrases like “the loo.”

Alexander Klöpping

Alexander is one of those Generation Y people that cycles with Google Maps, reads books on his
phone and always carries at least 5 gadgets. He has a nose for trends on the Web and in tech. The
Gadget Company, his start-up, embodies his ability to always know what we, the consumers, like!
Alex also writes columns about trends for several Dutch magazines and newspapers and shares his
knowledge with the Dutch citizens as a regular guest at the popular daily Dutch television show: “De
wereld draait door”.

Renato Valdés Olmos

Renato is a Dutch entrepeneur with a keen eye for design. Nowadays, you can find him working on Human.co, a startup focused on building tools that help people stay balanced and in control of their health data. Prior to founding Human.co, he has worked on digitalizing business cards through Cardcloud. He is also known for his design agency Postmachina, through which he has done work for the likes of Amazon. Renato has a Master’s degree in Interaction Design, but is more and more devoted to growing his teams in Amsterdam, New York and San Francisco. As an experienced founder of start-ups and as co-founder of Dutch entrepreneurial collective STIKK he advices startups on product design, marketing and fundraising.

Ernst-Jan Pfauth

Ernst-Jan has a passion for blogging since he wrote his first blog in 2006 and got awarded for some blogs. He still writes his own blogs, but he’s doing more: he spends his time writing columns for the Dutch blog nrc.next or hosting the Dutch talk show Literaturfest, a talk show about the favorite books of the show’s guests, like actors, writers, politicians and musicians. He also co-founded Brainsley, a tool for users to share their favorite links within their areas of expertise. Ernst-Jan initiates start-ups as Brainsley to fulfill his purpose in life: to organize the Web. Besides that Ernst-Jan wrote a book about blogging: Sex, Blogs & Rock-’n-roll.

Mike is the Mayor and founder of Appsterdam, the best place in the world to be and become an App Maker. He is also a legendary product engineer and world’s toughest programmer. He has worked on apps for Alaska Airlines, Delicious Monster, Tapulous, United Lemur, Apple, and Nextive, producing such hits as Delicious Library, Tap Tap Revenge, Obama ’08, and Apple’s Mobile Store.

Andreea has been involved in high profile projects around mobile music, teleconferencing and contact center software. In her work, she values understanding the users, their instincts and patterns of behavior and always designs compelling solutions with real people in mind.

Previously, Andreea was part of a core team in Nokia responsible for bringing touch interactions to mainstream products, working directly on Nokia’s first successful touch phone (5800 express music) which was sold in 13 million units worldwide. She was also one of the three people who started up the Helsinki office of Fjord Design, where she worked for clients such as Nokia, Yahoo, Nokia Siemens Networks, Vodafone and F-Secure.

Andreea holds a Masters in Interaction Design from Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, a reputable school set up by former Royal College of Art and Stanford faculty, together with members of the industry coming from IDEO, Nokia, Orange, and Hitachi.

Enrica is a 25 year old Italian interaction designer at Frog Amsterdam with an industrial design background from the Technical University of Delft. She has a passion for information design and visual thinking. At frog she is a visual storyteller where she designs experiences by telling stories.

mr. Egin Lengton (42) is owner of Lengton Legal; a company specialized in ICT and law. Lengton specializes in Internet law, copyright law, trademarks, ICT-contracts and licenses, general terms and conditions, e-commerce, privacy law and cloud computing. He is a consultant for SME’s and start-ups in the ICT business. Lengton is also a part time lecturer at Arnhem Business School (a HAN University of Applied Sciences faculty) and (co) author of various study books.

Laurent is the founder of HipByte, a software tools startup that recently launched RubyMotion, a toolchain for iOS development in Ruby.

He worked at Apple for 7 years as a senior software engineer, on both iLife and OS X. A long time rubyist, he created and still maintains the MacRuby project. In a previous life, he worked on IDA Pro and was an active contributor to RubyCocoa and GNOME.

Zed Shaw (Learn Code The Hard Way)
Zed A. Shaw is a prolific programmer who recently gave up coding for various startups, governments, universities, and mega-corps to work on a small business helping people learn to code. His “Learn Code The Hard Way” series has been read by over a million people from all over the world. This is really all an excuse to get to play guitar whenever he’s not writing.

Juanma Teixidó, award-winning Designer since 1994 spent the last 10 years co-founding and building agencies from the ground-up. Since then his client base grew to include Nike, The United Nations, Nedap among others. These days you can find him on Twitter chirping about all things design.

For the past few weeks, Luuk Hendriks has been working with us as a system administrator. Having worked with him before on a shared project, we are confident that he will be a competent and valueable addition to our team. It is with much delight that we welcome him. In this blog post he will introduce himself to the world.

Enter neckbeard

For a couple weeks now I, Luuk, am working with the guys at Phusion. A while ago I met Hongli and Ninh at the University of Twente during a project that involved a lot of coding, and the vibe was good. They could use some help at their operations and system administrations at Phusion, so I stopped shaving to gain some nerd cred. From my work with Ruby and Rails it was no surprise I already knew them: Ruby Enterprise Edition, Phusion Passenger, those are things you won’t easily miss. Working with these guys sounded like a great oppurtunity, so here I am.

In short, I’m a Telematics masters student at the University of Twente. My main interests in this area are highly available, scalable systems in networking and the web, and everything that is needed to realise them. Languages I like to hack in include Ruby and Haskell, although I sometimes try to find inner peace on lower levels doing some Z80 assembly on an old ZX Spectrum 48k (with varying success, to be very honest, but how bad-ass is that old nifty machine). As caffeine is part of most nerds’ daily toolkit, I feel obliged to show my weapon of choice:

Pure black, of course, with Arch Linux, AwesomeWM and zsh on the side completing my geek palate.

Besides my nerdy interests I can spend all my free time on collecting and listening to vinyl records (especially psych/kraut/free-jazz stuff), tinker with hifi equipment (again, with varying success, but that’s part of the charm right?), and playing the guitar. If ever Phusion will stop its current operations and become an 80’s glamrock band, I’m ready.

But for now, Phusion will continue to do what you know them for, and more. The soon to be released Union Station is one of the exciting things coming up, and it’s one of the projects I’m currently working on. When this comes out of Beta, we need a nice production cluster to support it, and we want to be able to replace or add servers without any significant downtime. This is where I come in, using the well-known Chef framework. It is a great way to get started on a project you are new to: for the new guy (that would be me), it is a great hands-on experience with all the aspects of the project, in both the software and the hardware supporting it. Writing Chef recipes, all of these parts will show up sooner or later, so it is a nice way to get familiar with a running project. But it is also a fresh look, a new perspective in an existing, maybe few years old, creation. Bi-winning.

Furthermore a new flavour of Phusion Passenger will be available shortly: Phusion Passenger Enterprise. Details will follow in the near future, but it’s going to come with many features that people have long asked for. It’s going to be released on July 24. Currently I’m stress testing an experimental branch, and things look promising. Be sure to keep an eye out for this one if you like your web apps served hot ‘n steamy.

All in all, there are a lot of exciting things at Phusion to keep me busy, with a nice and skilled team of people to support and guide me. Let’s see where things go from here. Be sure to get your BubbleConf tickets while the early bird reduction is still available, and meet me at the beautiful Tsuschinski in October. Just spot the neckbeard.

Because of an issue with our (now former) hosting provider, our blog and several of our websites had been down for more than a day. We were able to restore the blog posts, but unfortunately we lost several weeks worth of blog comments.

Just in case you haven’t noticed yet, http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/ is now running Phusion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition. We migrated them a few days ago, and other than a MySQL failure yesterday, it had been rock solid ever since. People have complained about wiki.rubyonrails.org being down often, but the uptime should be a lot better now. 🙂

Man, hardest talk ever, glad it went okay, now I can head off to bed… soon 😉
For those of you guys that didn’t have the chance to attend Ruby en Rails 2008, we’ve taken the liberty of uploading our presentation files.

“Phusion” and “Phusion Passenger” are registered trademarks of Phusion. “Rails”, “Ruby on Rails” and the Rails logo are registered trademarks of David Heinemeier Hansson. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.